The Silent Majorities

There's a lot of buzz at and around the Cool Kidz table today because, glorioski, there's actually another budget proposal out there, the one put together by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it not only seems to make more sense to more people than, for example, Paul Ryan's exercise in Magical Unicorn Math, or even than the principles underlying the president's proposal, which seem to be that, before we act on it, we should carefully check the Magical Unicorn's work before appointing the unicorn to the Council Of Economic Advisers. Moreover, that budget is certainly more consonant not only with the blog's First Law Of Economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money — but also with the results of the latest Gallup Poll, the sub-themes of which latter is, quite clearly, "Why In Hell Are We Listening To Joe Scarborough On This Stuff Anyway?"

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That's 77 percent of the respondents who want some sort of WPA 2.0 to make sure the bridges don't fall down while we're driving to work. That's 75 percent who want a federal jobs creation program. These two numbers include, respectively, 63 percent and 56 percent of Republican respondents. You could poll Paul Ryan's immediately family and not get these numbers. Neither Mr. Simpson nor Mr. Bowles could score this well on Christmas morning with the grandkids. You could ask Americans the question, "Would you favor immediate federal action that would provide you with unlimited whiskey and the sexual favors of your favorite movie stars?" and come close. Maybe. Does the House progressive budget, which proposes programs that track these numbers, have a chance in hell of passing? Of course not. It's barely in the conversation.

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It is helpful to look at these numbers in comparison to what's going on as regards sensible gun control. There are 60 percent of Americans who would back an assault-weapons ban similar to the one that Harry Reid threw over the side yesterday. As for background checks on all gun purchases, as proposed by the president, that scores 91 percent — higher, as kindly Doc Maddow pointed out last night, than the approval rating for, among other things, Italian food. Does sensible gun control have a chance of passing? Even the background checks are 50-50.

The system is designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, and that happens to be one of Mr. Madison's best ideas. But the protections that he and the rest of them put into place were always meant to be defensive measures, not offensive weapons. But the genius at the heart of conservative obstructionism always has been the ability to convert those protections from the former to the latter, the way you can re-purpose a semi-automatic weapon to full auto on the workbench in your garage because...FREEEEEDOOOOOMMMMM!!!, and to do so with utter, shameless disregard for either the public good, or the public's overwhelmingly expressed desires. A fire ladder is a good precaution, but not when the burglar uses it to climb in your upstairs window and steal the good silver.

You would think that, in a democratic republic, a party dedicated to frustrating the expressed will of a huge majority of the people would find itself in deep political peril. But there's no indication that either the public, or the political elites, see this current state of affairs as anything beyond ordinary politics and business as usual. Who's up? Who's down? Will Joe Manchin have a tough re-election fight? When you divorce politics from policy as thoroughly as we have done in this country — whether this has occurred through a feckless courtier media, or through a political class insulated by the power of money, or by the steady, parallel drumbeats of empty centrism and government-as-the-problem, or by all of those combined — then you ask for exactly what we have today — a nation of paralyzed, impotent majorities, speaking a language that the political elites no longer choose to learn. We have majorities that can be safely ignored.